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Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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W. E. B. Du Bois
Age: 95 †
Born: 1868
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: August 27
Autobiographer
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Photographer
Poet
Social Worker
Great Barrington
Massachusetts
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
WEB Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois
States
Destroy
Ignorance
Either
United
America

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As Negro voting increased, Congress got an improved sense of hearing.
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In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.
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No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.
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The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.
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If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers.
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Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it.
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The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination.
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All men cannot go to college but some men must every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold.
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The merchant must be no more pessimist than optimist, since pessimism induces him to hold back his capital but optimism induces him to take such risks that he has more to tear than to hope. Abu al'Fadl Ja'far al-Dimishqi (c. 9th century) Arab writer. The Beauties of Commerce Business pays ... philanthropy begs.
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The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?
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Liberty trains for liberty.
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The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
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Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.
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Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
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And yet not a dream, but a mighty reality- a glimpse of the higher life, the broader possibilities of humanity, which is granted to the man who, amid the rush and roar of living, pauses four short years to learn what living means
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Unless modern civilization is a failure, it is entirely feasible and practicable for two races in such essential political, economic and religious harmony as the white and colored people in America, to develop side by side in peace and mutual happiness, the peculiar contribution which each has to make to the culture of their common country.
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The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society if is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment from which forms the secret of civilization.
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I believe that there are human stocks with whom it is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false.
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The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
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